A/N: Hello again :) Here is the next chapter, and from here on out things are going to pick up the pace. The proverbial slinky is starting to move even faster now, so be ready. Also a huge thanks to Clmbls for reviewing and to HeartandImagination for leaving me some awesome reviews :D
Read on my friends.
Chapter Seven: Expansion
It was exactly 2:33 AM when Olivia received the call that another body had been found. Once again in New York, and Broyles told her to rouse the Bishops.
Peter sounded highly unimpressed when he answered the phone a few moments later.
"It had better not be what time I think it is," he said flatly.
"Then think it's whatever time you want it to be and we'll both be happy," she quipped. "They've found another body, in Brooklyn, New York at an opera house."
"Opera house? You mean the one where we crossed over?"
"Yeah," she answered quickly, at least that was something she remembered. Most of the other answers she'd been giving were plucked out the air like a drifting feather, misplaced and unfamiliar.
"I'll get Walter," he said with a sigh. "I'll see you there then 'Livia," he added and then hung up.
The scene resembled a black lily, something that Olivia had only seen once in her life. On the other side back home, there had been black lilies at her sister's funeral and she'd never forgotten the image of them; they were tattooed to her retinas like a burn. When she saw this, she didn't see the black charcoal stains on the retired stage; she saw long black petals reaching out from an obsidian epicentre. And the way the boards of the stage angled against the mark gave the impression of a petrified stem joining to the bloom. In the centre was a frozen body, as if the lily had suddenly taken on the traits of a Venus Fly Trap.
Olivia remained back for an instant so that she could safely breathe without the risk of choking; she wouldn't choke.
She watched as Peter approached the scene, his eyes scanning over the body like a floodlight. He stopped for a moment and she saw what he was surely looking at, a crumpled piece of paper on the ground. He reached for it, catching it between two fingers and opened it.
Out of curiosity she approached and peeked at the paper over his shoulder. He noticed and with a smirk, moved so that she could see it as well. Five letters in black ink were roughly scrawled across the page. YHHCSS.
"YHHCSS?" She said. "Any idea what that could be?"
"Maybe some sort of initials," Peter said.
"And you happen to know a lot of people with those initials?" She asked.
He chuckled. "Not yet, but I've heard my fair share of interesting names."
The body was swiftly arranged to be taken to Harvard for Walter's examination and Olivia walked away, the lily left on the stage but the image etched into the soft canvas of her retinas.
It was only hours later that Astrid had found the person's dental records through a scan of the charred teeth. Dale Wright, a thirty-two year old man from New York. From the people they'd questioned, apparently he'd ducked inside the opera house for a moment after wiping his brow. Although no one knew why the door was open as the opera house had been closed for months.
It was on a small street with a name that Olivia couldn't precisely remember that Mr. Wright had lived. They arrived fourteen hours after they discovered the body.
The house was quaint, painted in a demure and quiet shade of gray. The handles on the front door were made of unvarnished wood, cherry to be precise. It reminded her of a tootsie roll.
Now I sound like that damn scientist, she thought.
Peter, herself and four other FBI agents waited behind Broyles as he knocked on the door. No one answered. He looked over to Peter and then kicked open the door and rushed inside. The others swiftly followed him in.
Broyles' entrance into the home was like a conductor's cue that started a chorus of the word "Clear!" through the house.
Olivia walked into the living room of the home where she saw a single brown chair wrapped in corduroy next to the fireplace, and a shiny turquoise couch to seat three across the room.
She wondered where everyone else was.
Then she saw the framed pictures above the fireplace and she laid her hand on the mantle; it was rough like an old tombstone. There were photos of a man and a woman with two children, two girls; they were smiling,
She frowned when she saw the article about three members of a family being killed in a fire next to it. She didn't have to read it to know who's family it was.
She was standing next to the chair, and when she turned she realized that the couch was directly across from it. A prime seat to the turquoise mime placed so close she wondered whether or not he ever heard their voices.
"Hey," interjected Peter as he entered the room. His eyebrows growled together as he saw her stance beside the chair. "What is it?"
She looked at the chair and then back at the couch. "Nothing, I didn't see anything here. Did we find anything else?"
He shook his head, the skin around the corners of his eyes wrinkling slightly when he blinked. "No, there's absolutely no evidence here that this guy was a pyrokinetic, so...," he shrugged nonchalantly, "Maybe Walter's actually right this time about the spontaneous human combustion." The last bit oozed of green annoyance.
"And you sound so eager to agree with Walter," she quipped.
His face scrunched up a little from her comment. "Yea, like that's something I ever actually try to do," he answered.
"Would someone care to tell me where my package of red vines has gone?" Walter huffed as he strutted about the lab, his white coat flitting like an aggravated seagull.
"They're in the second drawer over there," Astrid answered with a gesture at a cupboard nearby.
Walter viciously yanked the drawer open and picked up the candy with a delighted "Aha!"
The tearing sound of the package was nearly muted as the thick doors to the lab opened with deep, yawning creaks that yielded Peter and Olivia.
"Ah Peter, Agent Dunham, you have news on this third victim I presume?"
"If you call a piece of paper and an empty house news then yes," Peter answered.
"Did you find anything at the house to confirm that this man was indeed a pyrokinetic?"
"No, so does that mean he was a victim of spontaneous human combustion?" Peter asked.
Walter chewed on a red vine, his mouth pursed into a squiggle of contemplation. "In all likelihood, yes. Although there would have to be something to incite the combustion as this man clearly could not have caused this."
"So you mean that something happened to him that caused this," Olivia asked.
Walter raised his eyebrows slightly. "Yes, but I suspect it was more of a someone who caused these people to combust."
"You mean someone murdered them?" Astrid asked.
"Unfortunately so, for these people to have combusted there must have been a sudden transfer of energy into their bodies which would excite the particles in their bodies and produce heat. Essentially this person would have been the catalyst." Walter said.
"You mean there was another person who was an actual pyrokinetic who caused this?" Peter asked.
Walter nodded.
Peter crossed his arms with a sigh. "And here I thought we had finally left the realm of conspiracy theories. Why would someone want to murder these people?"
"I've checked their records," Astrid said. "They have nothing in common; the first victim was a businessman, the second an editor and the third a pilot."
"So why these three people then?" Olivia asked.
"As they say, it's for them to know and us to find out," Peter answered.
Olivia nibbled on her lower lip slightly. "Apparently, I'm uhh, gonna go over their files a bit more, see if I can find anything," she said and disappeared into her office.
Peter stood over the tattered scraps of paper; they reminded him of a war-torn flag, shreds of a harbinger of hope. The most coherent phrase he could form was:
TO ERR AT THEE. I LEAVE. YHHCSS.
But even then coherency was a stretch at best.
"Hey," Astrid said over his shoulder. "How's the message coming?"
Peter shrugged. "About as well as the leads on this case," he motioned vaguely at the papers. "This is the best I could come up with."
He moved aside so Astrid could look over them, hopefully catching something he missed with her linguistically trained eyes.
She stopped for a moment. "Hey Peter."
He turned. "Yea?"
"Have you tried looking at this like a scrambled message? Or an anagram?"
He approached the table again, one arm crossed and the other halfway to stroking his chin. "No, I haven't."
She looked over her shoulder. "You should see this."
He paced forward slowly, his steps hindered slightly by proverbial lead bricks that weighed on his feet. He moved next to Astrid at the lab bench, her fingers placed on the edges of several letters in the message.
"These letters," she said, "when put together, spell SECRETARY."
BAM! Yes... a bit of a cliffie there I suppose, but fear not, I anticipate that chapter eight will arrive within the next week. As always, please leave a review and let me know what you think :)